Joint SPARC DynVar - SNAP Meeting (Oct. 2023)

A joint SPARC DynVar and SNAP Workshop was held on 9-13 October at LMU Munich, co-funded by W2W and locally organised by W2W PIs Thomas Birner (LMU) and Hella Garny (DLR), with help by co-organizers Amy Butler (NOAA, USA), Daniela Domeisen (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Chaim Garfinkel (University of Jerusalem, Israel), Alexey Karpechko (Finnish Meteorological Institute, Finnland). Both DynVar and SNAP focus on atmospheric dynamics, with DynVar focused more on climate variability and change, while SNAP is focused more on predictability at sub-seasonal to seasonal timescales. The workshop was a great success, being attended by a wide range of researchers interested in large-scale atmospheric dynamics and predictability. Overall, 138 participants from 22 countries attended the meeting, of which 68% were ECS and 34% were female.

Conference attendees. In the front: local organisers Thomas Birner and Hella Garny.

The workshop facilitated a total of 75 oral presentations and 66 posters over the 5-day event, with a keynote talk by Paul Kushner on improvements in understanding stratosphere-troposphere coupling over the past 15 years. Paul specifically noted that emphasising the role of large-scale teleconnections, like stratospheric downward coupling or lower-latitude influence of the Arctic Amplification, is an ongoing endeavour and requires persistent efforts. Besides the keynote talk, the workshop hosted 12 invited presentations by international speakers. Several of these invited talks summarized the progress on the SNAPSI project, a S2S forecast modelling intercomparison project led by SNAP to study the role of the stratosphere on surface weather and predictability.

On the social side, the workshop included a conference dinner in the "storage cellar" at Augustiner Keller, a famous Munich tavern. In addition, many of the attendees joined an afternoon-excursion hike to the Andechs monastery and beer-garden outside of Munich, enjoying the unseasonably warm weather in early October.

The beautiful hike to Andechs just outside of Munich

Overall the workshop was highly successful in achieving its missions of scientific exchange and the promotion of research in atmospheric dynamics and predictability. The organisers received plenty of positive feedback affirming the workshop's resonance within the scientific community.